Ana Lomba - Play and Learn Chinese

Ana Lomba and Marcela Summerville
with Lucy Lee Illustrations by Pedro Prez del Solar and Corne Cartoons/Enroc Illustrators This book is dedicated to Anas beloved daughter, Marina, a special-needs child who reminds us every day of the miracle of learning. Copyright 2012 by Ana Lomba. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978-0-07-178169-5 MHID: 0-07-178169-2 The material in this eBook also appears in the print version of this title: ISBN 978-0-07-175970-0, MHID 0-07-175970-0. All trademarks are trademarks of their respective owners.

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Young children are to language what ducklings are to water.

Let them jump in and play! Ana Lomba Welcome to the brand new Play and Learn Chinese! It is because of forward-thinking and visionary parents, grandparents, and educators like you that tens of thousands of children are now using the Play and Learn series to learn Spanish, French, and now Chinese in early childhood the prime time for language learning. Bravo! ho j le!

We gave a lot of thought to this question: What would a western parent need to tackle a complex language such as Mandarin Chinese in an immersive fashion that goes beyond memorizing a few colors, numbers, and animals? The goal of this book is to help children develop basic everyday listening and speaking skills in Chinese. Fortunately for non-Chinese speakers, there is a phonetic device for pronouncing Chinese words called Pinyin. Pinyin is an official transliteration of the Chinese characters based on the Latin alphabet and is taught in schools in China as a way to help children associate each character with its standard pronunciation. If you are wondering what Pinyin looks like, just take a look at the sentences appearing over the Chinese characters. These sentences are written in Pinyin. Youll also see that this book uses simplified Chinese characters, the form of characters used in China today.

Even though the goal of this book is to focus on speaking and listening communication skills, you can still practice writing the characters that accompany the vocabulary pictures. If your child wants to move on to the next level and begin to write Chinese, we recommend that you enroll your child in a formal course. In order to help you and your child recognize and acquire some words from the very beginning, we decided to highlight a few words in each situation (they are marked in bold). We recommend that you focus on learning these words first. Though learning these words alone will not be enough to communicate in Chinese, using them will feel like progress to you and your child, and building momentum is one of the best things you can do at this point of language learning. As you continue listening to and using this book, you will be able to remember more words and even entire phrases and sentence structures.

Concerning the content, we decided to stick with situations familiar to western families. Otherwise, there would be a risk of not being able to use the new language very often, and thats what this book is all aboutusing the language in your everyday life. That being said, the Do You Know? sidebars provide useful information about Chinese culture and daily life. Our goal with Play and Learn Chinese is to help users develop basic everyday listening and speaking skills. It would be beyond the scope of this book to target literacy skills.

Chinese is a tonal language. Chinese is a tonal language.

Tones are marked over the Pinyin vowels as shown here: First tone: a flat high tone. For example , which means mother. Second tone: a rising tone. For example , which means numb. Third tone: a tone that first falls and then rises. Fourth tone: a falling tone. Fourth tone: a falling tone.

For example